Black and grey tattoo of a cat's face inside an ornate frame on the upper thigh, beside a hand holding a pale blanket printed with skull faces.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat in an ornate frame on a thigh

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a thigh with a black and grey tattoo of a cat's face, seen from below, set inside an ornate, crown-like frame. The shading is soft and tonal, with darker outlines and lighter areas giving the face some depth. A hand holds a white blanket printed with black skull faces at the lower edge, and part of another dark tattoo is visible at the far left.

Thigh Cat Ornate frame Crown

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now, sit closer, for the wind off Scarrow Point has teeth, and I'll not tell a tale to a draught. Good. Mind the cat, she's been watching you since you came in.

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Old Mrs Tully kept the light on Scarrow Point the winter the fishing boats stopped coming home. Her husband had gone out in October and the sea kept him. What she had left was a grey tabby called Duchess, who would not come down from the lantern gallery, not for fish, not for the warm stove. She sat on the brass rail of the lens housing with her face tipped up at the glass, as if the lamp were a crown someone had hung above her for safekeeping.

Every night Mrs Tully wound the clockwork and lit the mantles, and every night the cat blinked slowly as the beam swept the water. The keeper said the lamp had its own pulse, and the cat seemed to count it. One night in February a fog came in so thick a man could not see his own boots, and the mantle cracked. Mrs Tully climbed the stairs with her hands shaking, too slow and too old, and found the cat already on the rail, paws tucked, staring into the murk as though she could see the rocks through it.

Mrs Tully swore afterwards she heard a bell, faint and wrong, drifting off the point. She fixed the mantle by feel and the beam went out across the fog, and the cat's eyes caught it and threw it back gold.

So when you're down at the harbour in the morning and some boy tells you the cat was just a cat, you tell him she wore that light like a crown, and she never once let it go out on her watch.